Travelers' Laptops May Be Detained At BorderNo Suspicion Required Under DHS Policies

Federal agents may take a traveler's laptop computer or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search policies the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed....

Don't carry any data over the border. A laptop should just basically be a dumb terminal that connects to a remote service. Also if you have Linux you are much more likely to have it taken away unless it starts splashing some friendly reassuring pictures right away.

I travel for my company (day job) mostly to China these days, sometimes the UK and Europe. I take a work laptop with me, not my own. It is running Win XP of course.

I use a portable version of TrueCrypt (www.truecrypt.org) and keep my work and personal stuff in an encrypted container on the hard drive, as well as flash drive (not that I have valuable data, I'm just guarding my privacy)

TrueCrypt says it is open source, and I like using it with Windows. Any chance it could be added to the repositories? Not sure if there is a GUI, which of course I prefer.

Since it is open source, back doors should be detectable, and as far as I know there are none.

I would think anyone who has something to hide, would at least do what I do, and probably much more. I don't see how inspecting hard drives will get at anything other than personal data.

I would think anyone who has something to hide, would at least do what I do, and probably much more. I don't see how inspecting hard drives will get at anything other than personal data.

Check http://www.wikileaks.org for one reason why they want to go thru everyone's hard drives: copied music! I shit you not. So you cross the border, they find bad britney spears or something... They are playing security theatre with this, but that is one big reason why....

I have seen numerous cases in the news where people were unknowingly sharing music because a file sharing program was installed (ARES Galaxy, Kazaa, etc). Sometimes the PC owners didn't know about the P2P software. In one case, the granddaughter loaded a P2P program on her grandparents PC. They never knew, but were nailed and fined for distributing music the kid had downloaded.

Programs like ARES by default seek and add all your media to a shared folder. In my experience, the average PC user does not dig into this, and I have found several customer machines sharing files, with their owners not knowing to what extent.

Why do I mention this? Because there was also a recent case in the news where a guy was busted for having child porn on his computer. However, he argued that a virus was responsible for this, and he didn't know about it. In the end, he was cleared of any wrong doing.

There have been cases where the music sharing people claim they were not aware of their "offense", yet were hit with heavy fines. It appears that in the US of A, having "illegal" music on your computer is completely inexcusable, even if you know nothing about the P2P program that someone else installed on your system (believe me, there are a lot of people who are generally clueless about their PCs). However, if you have child porn on your system, you might get away with it.

Conclusion: when traveling, music is going encrypted.

On my Linux machines, I use the encrypted files system encfs. Not sure about the security, but better than nothing.

And to think I can remember the day when I could travel from Ohio across Lake Erie to Canada and not have to show a passport or anything. That all changed of course with the panic after 9/11. Security and IP are the twin excuses for this clampdown and the freedom to travel without being harrassed.

One reply suggested staying in the "free world" but with all the regulation being added on an almost daily basis where is the free world these days. Granted we do have way more freedom than most areas but that is changing and if the left wingers continue it will continue to diminish as the government makes more and more decisions for us.

By Free World I hope you are not including the US for non-whites born outside of North America. On a recent trip with a bus load of teens from Canada into US customs officers tied us up for hours looking at a couple laptops and ipod touches. The kids they targeted were obviously "profiled".

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